Blog

Digital Ocean: The Verdict

There are many cloud providers and in reality, they all provide the same service – storage & compute power for you to use. Each provider puts their own little spin on the service to give them a unique selling point and an advantage over their competitors.

My initial thoughts of Digital Ocean were positive, the landing pages we slick and the pricing tables were very clear (much clearer than many of their rivals). This is what prompted me to sign up for an account.

When I logged into my cloud dashboard, I found that the simplicity was a core concept of their offering and it had been carried through to the user console. Let’s be honest, this is where we NEED the simplicity – in most cases we just don’t need the complications of the AWS dashboard (unless we’re deploying very complex apps) – all we want to do through the console is be able to:

Power on / off

Scale the instance

Take backups

See key info (like IP addresses)

Monitor server performance

If we can see all of that, we can accomplish almost anything with our instances. Couple all of this with Digital Ocean’s very nice browser-based console and we have ourselves a very capable service – with less complications and frustrations than the average cloud provider.

I am a big fan of Digital Ocean as they cater to the less experienced technologist. Almost anyone can sign up, deploy a WordPress instance and start building their online empire within an hour. I really do believe that this company could take the fight to the big players in the market and steal some of their SME clients.